For thousands of years, skeptics and believers alike have debated whether the events described in the Passover story—the parting of the Red Sea, the ten plagues, and the burning bush—actually took place. Roman Jewish historian Josephus Flavius speculated that the parting of the Red Sea “might be of God’s will or of natural origin. Let everyone believe at his own discretion.” The skeptic’s skeptic, Sigmund Freud, called the Passover story “a pious myth,” contending that Moses was a rebellious Egyptian prince who worshiped the sun god Aton and made up the Jewish religion as a political ploy. In more recent times, scientific explanations of the Passover story range from formula-laden academic papers like “Modeling the Hydrodynamic Situation of the Exodus” to more popular inquiries such as Cambridge materials scientist Colin Humphreys’ The Miracles of Exodus. Whether or not you subscribe to these theories, they beat listening to your little cousin sing the “Four Questions.”

Michael David Lukas has been a Fulbright Scholar in Turkey, a proofreader in Tel Aviv, and a waiter at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont. A graduate of Brown University and the University of Maryland, his writing has been published in Slate, National Geographic Traveler, Tikkun, the Boston Globe, and Georgia Review. He just completed a novel about the end of the Ottoman Empire, to be published by HarperCollins.